The Business of Education (Part 2)
This will be my last article in this series about the Ontario college system. I do expect to do some updates occasionally as the system adjusts to its new reality. Continuing on with the theme from last week about how colleges can better use business concepts to build a durable and sustainable system.
Business systems, with the right incentives, are the most efficient way to create widespread systemic change, even though they aren't perfect and shouldn't be used alone. These incentives should be established to ensure maximum value for all shareholders - students, community, business, and government.
Marketing: Last week I looked into product and sales; the next step in the chain is marketing and communications. The marketing and communications approaches that colleges in the Province use to attract students and engage with their communities appear to be homogenous. While there may be variations in taglines and color schemes, every college essentially utilizes the same tools, channels, and tactics to engage with prospective students. Resource allocation appears to be divided between high school recruiting efforts and media buys, with occasional unique campaigns that employ alternative strategies such as experiential marketing.
The true function of marketing within a business is to attract individuals to the product, service, or company. In the college context, many colleges in the province adopt a brand awareness approach, where the overarching marketing goal is to raise awareness of the college in its entirety, with only occasional awareness-raising for specific academic programs. The challenge with this approach is that the student's choice is not often a brand choice, but a life choice. Students make choices based on what they believe they want to study or the profession they wish to pursue, often given limited information about the options and where those options can lead them career-wise. They make choices based on the school's location and the impact on their work, families, and other personal responsibilities. Due to the diversity of students and their backgrounds, goals, and needs, colleges—constrained by resource limitations—choose to use a brand strategy as the default position.
Marketing options are also contingent upon the resources within the institution. Larger schools tend to have more resources and can therefore engage in more segmented and targeted marketing. For smaller schools with fewer resources, this targeted approach is more difficult to implement.
The current marketing approach needs to be replaced with a systemic solution where all colleges work together to build the brand of "college" as a whole. This solution would include some regional specialization, but the overall goal is to raise awareness and engage the community and businesses in the value of a college education. This would encourage more people to choose applied learning at a public institution over other options. Currently, advocacy groups and occasionally the government make small efforts toward this goal, but the colleges rarely work together to achieve it.
Educational and career choices are often influenced by personal experiences and the opinions of close acquaintances. People tend to make choices based on their lived experiences, either directly or indirectly, and are swayed by the opinions of those around them regarding colleges, programs, faculty, and potential careers.
To address this, colleges should create meaningful and impactful experiences for students. A focus on student engagement can lead to increased enrollment even in a declining demographic. Engaged students, whether current, former, or prospective, are more likely to succeed and speak positively about their experiences. Therefore positively influencing prospective students' decision making.
By giving faculty the freedom to innovate and create real-world learning experiences, colleges can further enhance student engagement. For example, incorporating client-based work early in the curriculum can provide valuable practical experience. Additionally, mentorship meetings that focus on career goals and personal development can foster a supportive learning environment.
Colleges need to develop a vertically integrated, experiential-centered marketing strategy that engages with their communities. This includes actively engaging with parents, students, teachers, business and community groups. By leveraging the creativity and enthusiasm of current and former students and faculty, colleges can develop unique and cost-effective approaches to community engagement. These approaches can be further integrated into college practice by incorporating them into a general education course, thereby fulfilling multiple mandates for the colleges, students, and the community.
While building relationships and trust within the community requires significant effort, especially in the current climate, it is crucial for the success of this marketing approach.
Services and ancillary operations:
Due to a lack of funding and increased needs, colleges have expanded student and ancillary services over the last two decades. These services are now being cut due to the current crisis. This expansion was also driven by gaps in societal funding (such as healthcare) and a higher need student population that required more support.
Colleges have increased their focus on ancillary services — such as housing and conferences — to create new revenue streams. However, the increased administrative and operational demands of these activities typically do not align with the governance and administrative policies of the college system. These policies were not designed to support the entrepreneurial activities that colleges are now engaging in.
The student services within the system and institution need to be rationalized. Colleges need to work together to determine what level of support can be realistically provided to students, and to design and deliver services within those limits. The immediate focus should be on providing services that most effectively support students' academic success. This will require a shift in approach, away from the unsustainable model of attempting to provide everything for everyone. While this may be uncomfortable and have negative consequences for some students, it is essential to prioritize the collective good. Ultimately, some students may not be able to attend or succeed in college as a result of these changes.
Colleges may seek to increase revenue by expanding ancillary activities, but this is not advisable during a crisis. Uncertainty breeds irrationality, and the system should avoid risky revenue ventures. Instead, colleges should focus on current ancillary activities that generate revenue and increase shareholder value, such as applied research, housing, and workforce development. One possible approach is to create separate incorporated entities to manage these ancillary operations. This would allow for different governance and staffing models, and potentially open doors to new opportunities. The colleges would become shareholders in these entities and could guide the development of alternative revenue streams. Similar models exist within the system, such as the separate but attached entities that manage student governments.
Staffing: The response to the crisis by colleges for the most part has been and will be the elimination and reduction of staffing levels. However, when the dust settles the approach to staffing colleges will not change. To build a sustainable applied learning system will require a reconceptualization of staffing models. First on the management side of things and starting at the top: College presidents' salaries and benefits are determined by individual term contracts, unlike other employees whose compensation is established through collective agreements or system policy. This creates a broad range of compensation packages that are not aligned with the institution's size, complexity, or success. As a public service, these salaries should be connected to the long-term success of the institution, not just short-term achievements. They should be capped and linked to other salary and benefit structures within the system.
Administrative positions can be reduced by decreasing the number of layers within colleges. As student enrollment, revenue, and government demands increased, colleges responded by expanding activities and creating new roles. This only served to further increase the need for more revenue. The current college administrative environment is filled with bureaucracy and excessive oversight. This has not helped to mitigate risk in decision-making, as evidenced by the current crisis. Colleges are good at expansion, but struggle to eliminate and reinvent themselves.
Organizational flattening requires increased trust and decision-making for faculty and support staff. It also requires significant growth in leadership abilities for supervisors. A flatter organization creates more accountability for all staff and the need for all staff to contribute to performance management and goal achievement.
The range of supervisory responsibility for administrators should also be reconsidered. The supervisory burden for both of my previous positions, with over 80 and less than 20 direct reports respectively, was significant. This created work that often was unnecessary and also detracted from value-added work for shareholders.
The college system's inability to be creative, innovative, and sustainable is due to faculty positions being governed by a mature provincial collective agreement. While collective bargaining is important, the current agreement and its usage hinder progress. The nature of faculty work has changed and faces additional stressors that the current agreement will only exacerbate, creating further distance between faculty and administration.
The current approach, with its increasing levels of detail, prevents the agility and innovation that are needed from faculty. More items, details, and metrics in the collective agreement lead to more levels of conflict that need resolution. To start building a better model for faculty, the focus should shift from adding more details to measure faculty work towards realistic limits on yearly courses taught and students taught. This builds flexibility into the system, but only when faculty have greater input into workload decision-making.
The current administrative approach aims to maximize workloads, leading faculty to work to adhere to that number. Reducing the focus on an arbitrary number calculated by an unproven formula is not a sustainable model. An agreement with guideposts and limits, supported by collaborative decision-making, sets the conditions for productive conversations. The goal is student success, which starts with determining where faculty have the greatest chance for creating student success over time. This may require faculty to take on tasks outside their comfort zone for the benefit of the program or school. Workloads should be determined through conversations and negotiations, not assignments.
A longer-term consideration for faculty collective agreements is to have more localized agreements with college-specific or region-specific autonomy. There are examples of these types of agreements where there are some system-wide limits but also institutional levels of specificity. However, this model only comes when faculty become more involved in decision-making and also the associated accountability of making those decisions. In the current circumstances, there is not sufficient trust between faculty and administration. This movement will require the abandonment of past practices and courageous leadership from both groups; otherwise, the system will continue to rely on increased government funding and alternative revenue generation to be sustainable. I have seen the transformative impact engaged faculty can have on the success of students, academic programs, and colleges. The effectiveness of this relationship between faculty and students is key to the future of applied learning.
Support staff are integral to the Ontario college system, yet they are frequently overlooked in decision-making and disproportionately affected by the repercussions of poor choices. Sadly, as the enrollment crisis worsens, these roles will likely experience the highest rate of elimination. To address this, we must first clarify the level and type of student and academic services required at each college, as this will determine staffing needs and roles. Additionally, flattening the organizational structure will require support staff to have greater decision-making authority, necessitating additional support and training. This support should not only include supervision but also encouragement for staff to be authentic and operate effectively within their roles and expected outcomes. Most importantly, supervisors of support staff must adopt new leadership approaches. These staff members possess expertise in systems, processes, and student challenges. A sustainable college system will leverage this knowledge to reduce inefficiency, engage students, and foster institutional resilience and agility.
To achieve a sustainable staffing model, decision-making must be decentralized, giving both support staff and faculty a significant voice and influence in the process. This will necessitate a restructuring of collective agreements to incorporate flexibility and agility. Shared responsibility for performance, success, and sustainability requires leadership contributions from all staff levels and roles.
International students: International students are essential to Ontario colleges, local economies, and Canada as a whole. However, the current system relies heavily on students from one country and the use of third-party agents. To attract the best international students from a wider range of countries, Ontario colleges should lower international tuition to actual costs plus a fixed contribution margin (e.g., 30%). The goal is to increase the number of applicants in order to find the best applicants from a wider range of countries.
To create a balanced mix of domestic and international students, academic programs should cap international student enrollment by program and not by institution. Programs should be viable for both clusters of students. Lower international tuition and program caps can provide a more stable pool of more highly qualified international students leading to greater student success, retention, and revenue generation. To further enhance engagement and success, colleges should eliminate third-party agents and build direct relationships with students throughout the application and admissions process.
College executives seem to be responding to the international enrollment crisis by prioritizing international students over domestic students, again. They are cutting programs that are no longer eligible for work visas, even if those programs also serve domestic students. And they are keeping programs that are still predominantly international and are eligible for work visas. This short-sighted approach ignores the needs of domestic students and prioritizes revenue generation from international tuition.
A better approach would be to deliver academic programs that meet the needs of both domestic and international students, while also meeting the needs of the local, regional, and provincial labor market. If colleges choose to (or have no other choice but to) offer programs that are primarily for international students, they need to mitigate the risk by ensuring that those programs are staffed and supported in an appropriate way. The revenue from those programs should be used to fund infrastructure expenses, not operational costs for non-related activities.
The end: This is the end of the series of articles I have written on the enrollment crisis in the Ontario college system. The Ontario college system has been in need of renovations for years, but it took a storm to hit before we started. As we begin, we realize that many rooms need to be stripped back to the studs and foundation. The problem for me is that colleges are now taking away the foundation while the roof and walls are still standing.
The last seven weeks have been challenging for me and those I care about who work in the Ontario College system. I have worked in the system for over 20 years and hope to return. Even though I am not currently working at a college, I wanted to find a way to contribute to building a more sustainable system. It would have been easy to simply criticize, but that approach doesn't improve anything. My goal in writing this series was to encourage innovative thinking and dialogue around how to provide a sustainable applied learning model for the province. The Ontario college system needs bold leadership from all constituents, especially executive teams, to overcome the systematic and institutional barriers that will prevent the rebuilding of a sustainable applied learning model. I believe in and have seen the power of people to exceed expectations and their limitations if given the right leadership framework. The crisis can’t be abated unless leadership rises to do what is necessary.
Thank you for the support and feedback on this series and my other leadership-focused articles. Next week, I will return to writing about leadership and sharing some work I have been collaborating on related to developing stronger leadership.
